“Eldest Son” Locarno Review: Family, Memory, and Migration
Lila, a young Korean-Argentinean girl, navigates the contradictions of her identity and tries to find her place in the world. Her father Antonio arrives in Latin America 18 years earlier and decides to bet everything on the promise of a young immigrant’s dream. A family epic that seeks to return to the past in order to reinvent the present.
Cecilia Kang’s perspective is unique in Argentina and Eldest Son (Hijo mayor) confirms it. Not only because she makes deeply personal films—here with clear autobiographical traces—but also because she brings to the screen the experiences of the Korean community in Argentina, giving visibility to their lives, stories, and perspectives. In this, her first work of fiction—or rather, mostly fiction—Kang explores what gradually becomes clear: the history of her own family.
The film begins in an observational mode, portraying a young woman named Lila (Anita B. Queen, better known as a DJ and for her collaborations with Ca7riel and Paco Amoroso), who goes camping with her father Antonio (Kim Chang Sung), a serious, reserved man. There they join a group of his friends—all members of the Korean community—with whom they share food, laughter, and the drunken stories of veterans, while Lila looks for a chance to connect with people her own age.
From there, the film shifts into an extended flashback telling Antonio’s story. He arrives from Korea to settle in Paraguay, surrounded by debts, financial struggles, and the many challenges of migration. Played in this stage of his life by Suh Sang Bin, Antonio is quite different from the man we met earlier: more hot-tempered, caught in shady or even violent situations, and constantly broke.
The final section of the film takes on a documentary tone, tying together what we’ve seen with the personal life of the director and her family. It reaffirms the autobiographical dimension while adding yet another chapter to the family saga and introducing new, complicated turns. Eldest Son works both as a life story and as a tribute, while also shedding light on little-known aspects of Korean immigration to South America.
Kang also shifts the film’s tone with each stage: starting with a fictional framework that still carries a documentary spirit, moving into a period setting closer to melodrama, and culminating in an intimate autobiographical documentary. While its overall length may feel slightly excessive, and the transitions between modes at first somewhat puzzling, Eldest Son ultimately weaves its narrative strands into something resembling an epic—one of those stories so deeply personal that, paradoxically, they speak to everyone.
